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Saturday, 16 April 2016

A to Z Challenge - N

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge is to post everyday (except Sunday) in the month of April 2016 starting with the letter A and going all the way to Z. The theme I chose is Genealogy Tips. At the end I will give a related post from my blog Genealogy: Beyond the BMD.

NOTE: My comments somehow got turned off at the Letter L ... it is working again and I always value and enjoy your comments. Thank you.

N is for Neighbours

In small communities especially, people depended on their neighbours. They saw each other in church and at community socials. They helped each other in need and also traded what they produced on their land.

My grandfather Herbert Mavor's uncle John was married to a Carbee, and his aunt Jean was married to a Swanson. The Mavors, Carbees and Swansons were all friends and neighbours. Jean's brother-in-law was a land agent for the west and that, I discovered, is probably the reason John Mavor and his buddy Edwin Carbee headed west to get some land. Once John was settled in Alberta he went home to marry is sweatheart, Edwin's sister Ruth Carbee.

One of the Carbee boys moved to the United States and on one of the US censuses a Swanson boy was lodging with him. If I was only researching Swanson's or just Carbees, I may not have made the connection, because there t no other link between the Carbees and the Swansons.

Also without checking the neighbours, I would not have been able to find the origins of Hannah Meade and why she was living with my Seale family in Barriefield, Ontario.

In my previous post for the letter L for Loyalty Oaths I see many of my ancestor's neighbours on the list of those that took the oath of fealty in Kingsbrige.

8 comments:

You did well with Needle(work) - I would think a lot of our ancestors made their own clothes. I have a great grand aunt who lived in a family's house all winter to do all their sewing - clothes, linens, etc.

I have used neighbors to help me find ancestors too. Usually my ancestor's name was indexed incorrectly. One of my great-grandaunt's divorce proceedings are online and many of the neighbors testified on her behalf. It's interesting tracing some of those names and seeing connections even later on.Visiting from AtoZWendy Jollett Etc.